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Mike Link and Kate Crowley are walking about 1,800 miles around Lake Superior to call attention to water issues as a way to help protect it for their grandchildren, here enjoying the Big Lake with Grandmother Kate.
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Full Circle Superior: Kate Dances in the Rain
Mike Link recorded wife Kate Crowley dancing in the rain to the tune of Tina Turner's "What you get is what you see," as they trek around the shores and roads of Lake Superior. Go to www.fullcirclesuperior.org for updates on their trek.
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Over five months beginning in April, Kate Crowley and Mike Link are walking as closely as possible to Lake Superior by trail, beach or road - and sometimes water. Lake Superior Magazine will carry the stories of their journey all year. And see updates on their progress at www.fullcirclesuperior.org.
by Kate Crowley
As you read this, if all goes as planned, Mike and I will be trekking somewhere along the Michigan shores of Lake Superior, having completed the Wisconsin leg and hugging the water as closely as possible.
While our goal was to walk the entire shoreline, we have learned it is not possible to do so. One stretch in Canada, from Wawa to Pukaskwa National Park, is so remote and inaccessible that our only walking option was the transcontinental highway, miles from the Lake. So we decided to go by water. In later July, we will get into a beautiful, big Voyageur canoe provided by Naturally Superior Outfitters and explore the shore from a different perspective.
In planning for this trip we tried to anticipate the many challenges ahead, but true love sometimes truly challenges us.
Our love affair with Lake Superior is many years running.
For Mike, it began on annual summer trips north with his grandparents to Fort William and Port Arthur (now the city of Thunder Bay). The trips left an indelible imprint, though at his impressionable age it was of the red-coated Canadian Mountie perched on his horse by the trading post across the border and not of the vast freshwater sea keeping them company along the road.
I didn’t see Lake Superior until I was in my late 20s and took a train trip to Duluth with my husband and children. Amtrak was traveling from St. Paul to Duluth in 1978. It was an adventure, but with two toddlers, our focus was on the zoo, not the Lake.
Our interaction with Lake Superior certainly changed when Mike started sailing out of Madeline Island in the 1980s, taking people on excursions and camping trips for the Audubon Center of the North Woods. I joined him on one trip. Once you are on a boat, you quickly realize that Lake Superior is an unpredictable, beautiful body of water. Time flows beneath you like the waves curling around the bow.
For Mike, sailing is a connection between our two most precious natural resources - air and water.
But now we are on a journey that will connect us not only with the water and the air, but the very lands around the vast shores.
Lake Superior is still the wildest and least populated of all the Great Lakes. Its drainage basin remains 91 percent forested and has five national parks, nine Ontario provincial parks and six Michigan, two Wisconsin and nine Minnesota state parks. Only three communities on its shores have populations of more than 50,000.
This makes our trip a true expedition because we will explore landscapes that few people ever see. We feel like modern explorers, seeking to understand this magnificent land and waterscape, and we expect to discover new knowledge every day.
In our research, we have found mileage estimates ranging from 1,350 to 2,925 for the shoreline, with 350 to 7,000 streams or rivers - depending on how they’re defined. There are a lot of unknowns ahead.
Lake Superior holds 10 percent of all the world’s readily available fresh water and contains more water than all of the other Great Lakes combined. This alone should make it one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
From this most northern of the Great Lakes (at 601.1 feet above sea level), the water flows out of the basin at 75,000 cubic feet per second. Its one flow egress is through the St. Marys River. The turnover is so slow that a single drop entering Lake Superior takes about 191 years to leave and could take 300 years to reach the St. Lawrence Seaway. And because the Lake is so cold, the normal turnover in other lakes doesn’t happen here. This means whatever we flush or dump into this Lake is going to be there for a long, long time.
Public awareness and concern is growing about the future of fresh water. From space our planet is a beautiful blue ball; a water planet really, since 70 percent of it is covered with this liquid. But only 3 percent is fresh water and 80 percent of that is currently locked in ice. We can live without many things, but not without water or air. So, it is our responsibility to understand, protect and preserve this life-giving resource for the generations to come.
Lake Superior is so large it seems impervious to change, but that is far from true. Since the arrival of European explorers and settlers, more than 185 non-indigenous life forms have invaded the Great Lakes. Some coexist with the original inhabitants; more often the invaders destroy and replace native species.
On our quest, we decided to make use of our time and experiences and record data that could be of use to science and future generations. As naturalists and educators, it seemed only natural to do this. We plan to take photos in the four cardinal directions and make notes on plants and animals every three miles (about every hour). This is baseline data never before recorded.
We will also take an inventory of invasive species using GPS coordinates, photos and notes.
This project is especially for the Invasive Species Research Center at Algoma University, Sault Ste Marie, Ontario.
We also want to meet people around the Lake, to record their beliefs and concerns. With the help of Michigan Technological University, Natural Resources Research Institute at the University of Minnesota Duluth, IBM and St. Catherine University in St. Paul, we have created a survey to gather this information.
Finally, we will photograph the mouths of as many streams as possible for current water levels, information sought by NRRI for use with any requests to lower the Lake’s water level. All of these projects are intended to note what exists in 2010 for future comparisons. This journey will be our greatest life adventure and, we hope, our gift to the future.
Lake Superior, after all, is in our proverbial backyard. We live 50 miles south of its shores, but still feel its pull on our hearts and souls.